


Time and Again

by follow_the_sun



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Domestic Bliss, F/M, Fluff and Smut, Happy Ending, Light Angst, M/M, Multi, OT3, Oral Sex, Polyfidelity, Post-Avengers: Endgame (Movie), Threesome - F/M/M, Time Travel
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-24
Updated: 2019-12-24
Packaged: 2021-02-26 06:00:58
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 16,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21928618
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/follow_the_sun/pseuds/follow_the_sun
Summary: “Oh, thank God,” said Bucky. “I’ve been shipping the two of you since 1943.”Steve goes back in time. Things go a little differently than he expects.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Peggy Carter/Steve Rogers, Peggy Carter/Steve Rogers
Comments: 14
Kudos: 90
Collections: Only the Most Beautiful, Primus Inter Pares





	Time and Again

**Author's Note:**

> Happy winter holiday of choice, fandom! And thanks for doing way more than you know to keep me afloat. This is my little offering of gratitude: not an Endgame fix-it exactly, but an Endgame... continuation, of sorts. Anyway, here's part 1 of a slightly different ever-after. 
> 
> [Please check the end notes if you need more info on the archive warning.]

“Oh, thank God,” said Bucky. “I’ve been shipping the two of you since 1943.”

Steve stared at him. Okay, technically, that was the answer he’d been hoping for, but he hadn’t expected Bucky to be so blunt about it. “Did you just say shipping?” he asked.

“Heh,” Bucky said. “Picked that up from the spider-kid, I guess. It means I want you two in a relationship, so I’m relation-shipping you. Like…” Bucky cupped his mismatched hands into C’s and moved them toward each other, like a child making a pair of dolls kiss. “‘Oh, Steve, kiss me!’ ‘Oh, Peggy, I love you, let’s fondue!’”

“Jesus, you really aren’t ever gonna let me live that down.” Steve took a deep breath. “I want you to come with me.”

For a moment, he got to see Bucky genuinely caught by surprise, eyes wide, lips parted, surprise shining off him like the old radium watch-dials they quit making while he was in the ice. Then he lowered his eyes and gave a skeptical huff. “No, you don’t.”

“I do.”

“You’re an idiot, then.” Bucky looked him full in the face, and—well, even back in the old days, when feelings were safer things for both of them to have, Bucky had rarely let anybody all the way in. Easier to make a deflecting joke, smile that ladykiller smile, and drag his companions along to the next adventure so smoothly that they wouldn’t even know they were being railroaded. Steve understood what a gift it was that he didn’t do that now. “Rogers,” he said, “you go back to, what, 1950, you’re taking back the life you should’ve had all along. Me? That life was over for me as soon as Zola shot me full of his knockoff super-gunk in Azzano.”

“That’s not—” Steve began, but Bucky’s eyes silenced him.

“You’re gonna make me say it, aren’t you?” he asked, very quietly. “What kind of life would there be for me in the past? Even if I went back to my family, what then? Tell ’em I lost an arm, tell ’em I did horrible things—”

“They wouldn’t _care_ about that, Bucky—”

“Maybe, but it’s not just that, Steve.” Bucky drew a deep, shaky breath. “I spent enough time hiding who I was back then. You were the only one who knew because you were the only one who didn’t care. This world, it’s… it’s got a _place_ for guys like me, you understand?” He lowered his eyes. “You think it makes me a coward, not wanting to go back to that?”

“No,” Steve said, as emphatic as he’d ever been in his life. “I just… I don’t want to lose you again, Bucky.”

“You won’t,” Bucky said. “I’ll be right where you left me.” Abruptly, his face cracked into a smile. “I mean, speaking of me being, y’know, whatever the term is nowadays, do you really think I’d bail before I got a chance to make good on those bedroom eyes Wilson was giving me at the funeral? I’m gonna get me some amazing pity sex tonight.”

“Bucky!” Steve’s laugh was yanked out of him before he could stop it. “Oh my God, I can’t—really? I mean, I don’t… I can’t think of anything I’d like more than you two getting together, but—you think he’s into you?”

“Sure, why not? Guy put up with _your_ bullshit for long enough, he’s obviously got a thing for sad sacks,” Bucky said, and Steve pretended to slug him on the shoulder before he pulled him into a hug. Bucky still stiffened with surprise when he did that, but he didn’t resist, and after a minute his arms came up to press tight against Steve’s shoulders, too. “I’ll be okay,” he said. “You _saved_ me, Steve. Past tense. Go save yourself for a change. Peg too. I know she made a life for herself, but anybody who watched that film strip in the Smithsonian could see she would’ve traded it all to have you back.” He paused. “You gotta do two things for me, though, okay?”

“Anything, Buck,” Steve said, and meant it.

“I know Banner thinks you’re going off into a little pocket universe, and whatever you do there won’t affect this one,” Bucky said, and Steve looked at him in surprise. He hadn’t thought Bucky was paying attention. But then, that was Bucky all over: always a little sharper, a little more insightful than he let on. “I’m not so sure, though,” he went on. “Shuri has this whole model about multiverse collisions she’s working on that… well, never mind. The thing is, I need you to promise me you won’t wake me up early, or try to come after me before it’s time. Let things play out the way they did in this timeline. I’m pretty okay with where I wind up at the end of it. Find your best girl, live a good life, but I’m telling you as plain as I can, I’ve already got my second chance, so don’t risk fucking yours up on my account.”

“Bucky—”

 _“Promise_ me, Steve,” Bucky repeated, and Steve said, “I promise,” as if they didn’t both know he’d do literally anything Bucky asked him to, whether or not he understood it. Swallowing the lump in his throat, he said, “What’s the other thing?”

“When you do see Sam again,” Bucky said, “I want you to troll the _fuck_ out of him,” and Steve clutched his chest and doubled over with laughter, and that was when he knew it was all going to be all right.

☆☆☆

When she opened the door, he knew immediately that he’d made a mistake. No, he thought, half a heartbeat after that: he’d made a _million_ mistakes. Should have called ahead, should have gone to Howard first and gotten him to break the news to her, should have bought a better suit, gotten a haircut, a shave, a shoeshine. Should have brought more flowers, or different ones, or diamonds, or— “Sorry I’m late,” he blurted, and she just stood there, staring, absolutely frozen in shock.

She reached up to touch his cheek, as if to reassure herself that he was really there. Then she said, “I’m going to _kill_ Howard for not telling me he found you,” and burst into uncharacteristically loud, ugly sobs that didn’t make her any less beautiful at all.

He held her, because what else could he do? When she’d finished he showed her the compass with her picture, the one he’d carried all those decades forward and back again, and then she told him, “Wait there,” and disappeared for several minutes, returning with a fresh face of makeup and a bottle of whiskey that she slugged directly out of in a way he’d last seen her do on a Howlies mission somewhere behind the Russian border. “So,” she said, with only a slight tremor in her voice. “Last time we spoke, you said it was a bit hard to explain what was happening. Perhaps you’d care to elaborate now.”

“Peggy,” he said, and then she kissed him, tasting of whiskey and Tangee lipstick, and then she punched him in the shoulder and he said “Ow,” and then she was laughing, with an edge of hysteria she was clearly trying to smother, and kissing him again, and after a long time of alternating between that and the whiskey bottle, he told her as much of the story as he’d decided he could, in good conscience, when he first concocted this ridiculous scheme. The plane, the ice, being woken. A strange future, scarce on the details even when she asked, and eventually she grudgingly agreed that it _was_ probably best if she didn’t know too much of it, not to mention that 2011 was too far off to be a real year anyhow. Tony, who, when Steve referred to him as Howard’s son, she had a harder time believing in than cryogenic freezing. Other devices like the Tesseract, one of which affected time, which he’d ultimately been sent on an errand to return to its rightful place, but not before making the recipient promise to send him _here._ He expected her to push back more than she did—“I’ve seen some things myself since then. One day I’ll tell you about Dark Matter,” was all she would say at the time—but at the end of it, when he ran out of words and she was still looking at him, he finally concluded with, “And maybe I should have come back to right after, but… I didn’t want to deprive you of your choice.”

“Choice?” she said, and oh, God, she was going to make him say it. 

“I know you’re in love with someone else,” he said. “Someone you’re thinking about marrying.”

She looked at him silently for several seconds, and then she snorted a laugh. “Oh, you’re not talking about Daniel Sousa,” she said. “We kissed once, and then I sent him packing. Or rather, sent him back to the very lovely girl he’d been planning to marry before circumstances threw a wrench in things. I had a hand in talking her into forgiving him, in fact. We’re all good friends now; I see them when I fly to Los Angeles with Howard once or twice a year, but Daniel and I were never a serious item.”

“No, I—I’m sure I’m right, Peggy. I checked the date. In the world I came from, your engagement was announced in the paper next week. I hope I’m not ruining the surprise,” he added, belatedly. “I had B—I had a friend look it up; I didn’t want to know who it was in case… Anyway, I waited until now because I knew you wouldn’t rush in. I wanted to give you the choice to… If you’ve moved on, if you’ve found someone new and you love him—” 

“Oh, Steve, you bloody idiot,” said Peggy. “You have to see what’s happening here. It’s you I’m going to announce my engagement to, darling. It always _was_ you.”

“Howard’s kid and his science buddy seemed pretty convinced that time travel sends you to a different universe,” Steve protested, but he was suddenly remembering Bucky’s face when he’d found the announcement. He’d written down the date and the city, but he’d given Steve one of those long, speculative Bucky looks that might have meant… “I’m going to need an alias, if I’m going to stay here now,” he said. “Got any ideas?”

“Why, yes, Steven Grant,” Peggy said, “I believe I have quite a few ideas about what to do with you, actually.”

☆☆☆

Mr. and Mrs. Steven Grant were married six weeks later, in a small ceremony witnessed only by a few friends: Howard Stark, of course, and a couple who’d completely thrown him off his stride when they were introduced as Edwin and Ana Jarvis, and the three Howlies who were living Stateside: Gabe and Morita and Dum-Dum, who held the latest iteration of his stupid bowler hat in his hand while he signed the witness form. Everybody cried except Howard, who called them both idiots for tying themselves down shortly before taking Steve aside and warning him that he wasn’t afraid to unleash his very worst inventions on anyone who made Peggy less than perfectly happy for a single instant. 

Steve, who knew all too well what some of those inventions would do in the future, kept as good a poker face about it as he could. Besides Peggy, Howard was the only one who knew the truth about Steve’s reappearance (the rest of them had been fed an absurd lie about Steve’s nearly frozen body being towed up in the nets of a Norwegian fishing boat and a long case of amnesia that only resolved upon his hearing a broadcast of something called _The Roxxon Motor Oil Captain America Adventure Program)._ Lying to the rest of the world seemed necessary; lying to Howard was impossible, given that he had—Steve could see it so well now—the same tenacity as poor Tony did, the same tendency to pick and pick at a problem until it unraveled for him. He just hoped Howard would respect what he’d said repeatedly about how knowing too much about the future put it at risk, and leave him alone about it. And for the most part—except for a few good-natured jabs when there was no possibility of even the Jarvises overhearing them—Howard actually did.

Working at SHIELD seemed like asking for trouble, and Peggy’s job paid the bills, so he mostly took freelance work doing commercial illustrations for magazines for a while. Later, he branched out into covers for the kinds of lurid pulp mystery and science fiction novels he and Bucky had bonded over when they were kids: scantily clad women pursued by monsters that might have occasionally shown an uncanny resemblance to the Chitauri or Thanos’s lieutenants; gleaming cities that had a suspicious resemblance to Birnin Zana in Wakanda; spaceships that looked not entirely unlike Quinjets. It mostly exorcised the demons, dumping them out of his brain and onto the paper, and if Peggy suspected, she only smiled at him and said nothing.

She told him she was pregnant on on New Years’ Eve in 1951, over an opulent three-course dinner Ana had prepared for them for the occasion. He stared at her blankly while the words registered in his brain, and then he rushed around the table, picked her up, and swung her around, laughing and crying at the same time, while she chided him to put her down and pretended she wasn’t exactly as happy as he was. “I’ll stay home with the kids,” he said, “you won’t have to stop working,” and, “I never intended to,” she said sharply, “but I’m glad to see you’re being progressive about this,” and for the thousandth time, he wished he could tell her about the shakeups that were going to happen in the next thirty years, that a time was coming that wouldn’t be perfect, but would give women so many more choices than the ones she’d had to carve out for herself. That if they had daughters, they’d grow up to opportunities that almost nobody living now could imagine. But he couldn’t tell her, so he made celebratory love to her instead, and when she fell asleep with her head pillowed on his chest, he thought there was nothing in the world that could mar his perfect happiness.

In the wee hours of the night, on the first day of 1952, he had the dream again for the first time since 2017.

Peggy woke him, shaking him frantically, and told him he’d been thrashing and screaming, and also that he was safe and there was nothing to be afraid of, but that wasn’t the point at all. Of course _he_ had nothing to be afraid of; what he was thinking about was _Bucky._ Bucky in the cryo tube, Bucky in Zola’s clutches, maybe even now being mutilated in preparation for fitting a prototype of the metal arm. And yes, maybe it was irrational to feel guilt over being happy while Bucky was suffering who knew what, but he was stunned to realize how much _anger_ he was still carrying around about it. He’d always assumed that if by some miracle he did end up with a wife and a family, then Bucky would be there for his kids on every birthday and every Christmas, tossing them in the air or rocking them to sleep with that magic touch he’d learned by caring for his little sisters and generally loving those kids almost as much as Steve would himself. Peggy was perfect and strong and kind and wonderful and more than enough in her own right, and he was almost shamefully lucky to have Howard and the Howlies and the Jarvises besides, but Bucky was _family,_ and he didn’t want to raise his kids in a world without him.

At any other time, on any other night, he might have—no, he _would_ have—kept it to himself, and pushed it down into that place where, Sam had once joked, he put his feelings in a bottle and put the bottle in a box and labeled the box _Open this never._ But the box was full, goddammit, and it all spilled out of him before he could consider whether it was wise or not, and before he knew it the words had dried up and Peggy was looking at him with a mix of anger and compassion that was almost as complicated as the stream of nonsense he’d just spilled all over her. “Oh, Steve, why didn’t you _tell_ me any of this,” was what she finally said.

“I know,” he said, miserable. She’d have every right to throw him out of her life for hiding something as massive as the rebirth of Hydra from her, a founding member of SHIELD. “I thought, if I told you about Zola—”

“You let me handle that bastard,” she said, the unaccustomed profanity dropping between them like a lead weight. “I’m talking about _you,_ my love. Carrying all of that alone for two years now—ooh, you’re infuriating sometimes, do you know that? Why didn’t you ever think that maybe it would help to _talk_ about this?”

“I did, Peg. It’s just so—”

“Complicated, yes; time travel, yes,” she said, in a tone that made it clear she didn’t consider that any kind of excuse. He was definitely going to catch hell about this at some later date. But right now, Peggy had her thinking face on. “Arnim Zola is living out his days in Camp Lehigh,” she said. “If Bucky is anywhere Stateside, he’s there.”

“Doesn’t matter,” Steve said, “I _promised_ him, Peggy,” and she huffed and swatted at him, a gesture almost lost in the mountain of blankets she kept piled on her side of the bed in the chill of Brooklyn winters. “I’m not saying we’ve got to wake him up,” she said, “and I’m not even saying I’ve got to _stop_ Zola, not entirely. I think I’d rather know about this and keep him close than send him away to rot in prison where I can’t keep an eye on him. I _am_ going to limit the amount of harm he can do, though. I’m sorry, darling, but I’m afraid you can’t ask me to put that genie back in the bottle.”

That was uncomfortably close to his own analogy from earlier, and now Steve really did feel agonizingly guilty about letting one moment of weakness break down all his careful work in not disrupting the timeline. “What are you doing?” he said, as Peggy shoved the blankets back and put her feet on the cold wooden floor.

“Well, I’m certainly not going to sleep any more with all this in my head,” she said. “Get dressed, then phone Mr. Jarvis and tell him we need him to bring the car around. Tell him that we’re going on one more adventure.”

☆☆☆

Jarvis was the only one of them achieving any semblance of looking well-rested when they reached Camp Lehigh shortly after dawn, which made it ironic that Peggy ordered him to stay in the car and have a nap while she led Steve into the hidden SHIELD office—or so she thought. Steve opened the trick door behind the shelving unit (“How in God’s name did you spot that?” Peggy demanded, and Steve flailed hopelessly a little bit, trying to decide what parts of _that_ story he could or should tell), and he braced himself for a powerful sense of déjà vu when he walked in first with his shield raised, but it didn’t come. The computer banks and tape reels hadn’t been installed here yet; instead there was medical equipment, steel tables, and, horribly, a chair with metal clamps at the wrists and on the headrest. It could only be a prototype of the mind-wipe device Bucky had described—would describe—to the Wakandan neurologists in 2017, and Steve squelched a powerful urge to tear it to pieces. And against the back wall was a man-sized machine, gunmetal gray with a glass window on top that made it look like a cross between Dr. Erskine’s Project Rebirth chamber and Snow White’s glass coffin. 

He knew what he was going to find before he looked through the little window, but last time he’d seen Bucky’s frozen face, it had only been a photograph, already old and faded. Standing here, with less than an inch of frosted glass between them, it hit him all over again how much Bucky suffered, _would_ suffer, and all of it for him, and God in heaven, Bucky had actually thought _he_ was the one who wasn’t worth fighting for. 

Then there was a thump, and a low buzzing electrical sound accompanied by the hiss of escaping gas, and under his hands, the metal coffin began to open.

“What did you _do?”_ Steve yelped at Peggy, who was standing off to the side, her face impassive, with her hand flat on a large red button.

“Well, you might have promised not to wake him, but I never did,” she said crisply. “And it was this or put up with the next fifty years of you moping.”

 _“Peg,”_ he pleaded, and there was no nice way to put it: suddenly he was scared, just pants-shittingly _terrified,_ because it wasn’t just him or even Peggy who might be in danger this time, dear God, it was the _baby._ “Get behind me,” he ordered, shield raised, as Bucky’s eyes flickered open.

He lurched forward, and Steve instinctively moved to catch him, but once again, he was too late. Bucky crumpled and hit the ground in a heap, and Steve had just enough time to see the flash of silver at his left side before he hauled him back up, holding him against the side of the cryotube in a horrible parody of a lovers’ embrace. Bucky’s lips parted, and his eyes flickered open, hazy and impossibly blue; and Steve, completely unaware that tears were streaming down his own face, searched those eyes for the smallest flicker of recognition— 

And then Bucky gagged, unloaded the entire contents of his stomach onto Steve’s front, lolled his head to the side, and passed out.

Steve turned and looked back at Peggy, who was staring at the two of them, still as a statue. Then, without warning, she started to laugh, and it was Steve’s turn to gape at her in shock. “For God’s sake, Pegs,” he said, and she practically doubled over one of the steel tables.

“I’m sorry, darling,” she managed, between gasps. “It’s just, I’d rather thought if anyone was going to do that this morning, it would be me. And after everything you’ve been hiding from me for the last eighteen months, you really can’t say you don’t deserve it.”

“Peggy, this isn’t funny!” Steve bent down, trying to get the dead weight that was Bucky into some kind of a lift, but it was like Bucky’s limp form was being difficult on purpose. “We have to put him back in,” he said, making a futile attempt to maneuver Bucky back into the metal casket.

“We are going to do no such thing,” Peggy said, every syllable precise. “I couldn’t live with myself, and I’m certainly not such a fool as to think you could. Besides, do you have the first idea how to operate this machine? It was no risk to revive him, they’d obviously want to be able to do that in a hurry, but putting him back under again? If we got it wrong, we could kill him. Now, we can argue about it until someone comes along and catches all three of us where we shouldn’t be, or we can nick a few important-looking papers, make it look like some other counterintelligence agency did this, and watch Zola sweat while he tries to figure it out, since he certainly won’t be able to tell SHIELD about anything that’s happened in this secret lair of his.” She turned and started walking back toward the hidden door. “Oh,” she shot back over her shoulder, “and take off that shirt before you get back into Howard’s car. Let’s not cause poor Mr. Jarvis any more distress than we absolutely must with regards to the upholstery.”

“Peggy, we can’t—we have to—” She’d already turned her back to him, and Steve hadn’t known what he was going to follow it up with anyway. There was really only one option, and it was to do as Peggy said, so he adjusted his grip on Bucky and followed her up the stairs.

☆☆☆

“So we may have ruined your car,” Steve told Howard, while both of them stood over the bed, looking down at Bucky’s unconscious body. “Also, we may have broken history.”

“I’ll buy a new one,” Howard said absently. 

“A new car, or a new space-time continuum?” 

“Pfft,” said Howard. “Time isn’t a continuum, it’s a starfish. Chop a leg off and it just grows a new one. You’re one arrogant bastard if you think you have the power to break the universe, my friend.”

“There’s a phrase here about pots and kettles,” Peggy stated, although Steve could tell her heart wasn’t in the banter any more than either of theirs were. “And while I’m grateful you didn’t use the more obvious metaphor, starfish have arms, not legs, Howard.”

“Thanks, Peg, I’ll make a note.” Howard leaned down, reaching out to touch the metal that plated Bucky’s shoulder, and Steve caught his hand before it could connect. 

“Careful,” he warned. “We don’t know what state he might wake up in. There’s… reason to suspect they were brainwashing him. He may not even recognize me.” _He may_ kill _you,_ he didn’t say, because then there really wouldn’t be any way to salvage the situation.

“Yeah, real dangerous pal you got here, Rogers. That fever’s gotta be a hundred and four right now. He needs fluids and penicillin.”

 _He needs IV ciprofloxacin and corticosteroids,_ Steve thought, because that was what Shuri had given him when she detached the metal arm after Tony destroyed most of it. “Hospital’s out of the question,” he said. “Too much to explain.”

“Yeah, I’ve noticed you don’t do a lot of that these days.” Howard was still deeply annoyed that Steve wouldn’t give him more information on the future, despite Steve’s assurances that he, Howard, was going to be just fine without it. “Smart of you to bring him here, anyway. Jarvis! Where’s that—ah, good,” he said, as Jarvis appeared at his elbow with a tray containing, Steve was startled to see, a full complement of surgical tools and, Steve was sadly not so startled to see, a glass of Scotch on the rocks. Howard downed it before he put on the gloves, and Peggy put a restraining hand on Steve’s arm and shook her head as he picked up a syringe and filled it, then slid it into Bucky’s right arm. Steve tensed, ready to spring into action if the Winter Soldier’s lightning reflexes kicked in, but Bucky only twitched, mumbled, and went limp again without ever opening his eyes. “This should keep him out long enough to let us get some fluids in him. If we’re lucky, that’ll be enough to put him on the mend.”

“And if we’re not?” Steve asked, tensing.

Howard was clearly about to say something flippant, but a glance at Steve’s face stopped him. “I need to break out Erskine’s files,” he said instead. “Assuming this is similar to your serum, which so far we only have your word for. Where did you say you found Barnes again?”

“I didn’t. And I don’t plan to. Howard, it’s not that I don’t trust you, it’s—”

“The future, yeah, I got it, Rogers. The amount you’re _not_ telling me is the best evidence you could give me that I’m pretty important in it.” Howard patted him on the shoulder. “You should get some rest, pal. Take an upstairs guest room. Jarvis will call you if anything changes.”

“I’m staying with Bucky,” Steve said. “But Peggy shouldn’t be on her feet.”

There was a brief silence, during which he could’ve sworn he heard the wheels turning in Howard’s head, and if looks could kill, he was pretty sure Peggy’s eyes would have disembowelled him where he stood. But for once in his life, Howard managed to exercise a very little bit of restraint. “So you remember where the—”

“Yes,” Peggy said, and stalked off, either to actually take a nap or, more likely, to complain about him to Ana, either of which Steve was perfectly all right with so long as she and the baby were out of harm’s way. Let Bucky wake up and shatter his cheekbone with the metal fist again; he’d heal. _Just let him wake up,_ he thought, and it was the closest he’d come to praying in a very long time.

☆☆☆

He knew Bucky was awake when his breathing changed, but he stayed very still, and kept his own breathing perfectly even, and although it took every ounce of self-control he had, he didn’t move until he heard Bucky turn his head toward him, sigh, and say, “Jesus, I get myself killed in a war and I still can’t get rid of this blonde asshole?”

Steve dropped the book he’d been pretending to read, on and off, for something on the order of eleven hours now, and let out a breath of relief that felt like it came from all the way down in his toes. “Buck,” he said. “What do you remember?” 

“Fuck if I know.” Bucky’s voice was weak, and his face in the lamplight was as pale as Steve had ever seen it, but it _was_ Bucky, an impossibly young Bucky who’d been through too much already but not nearly as much as the one he’d left in the future. He knew right then that he’d failed miserably in keeping his promise, because there was no way he was letting Bucky go back to that life. He didn’t know how he was going to square it with his conscience—or with Peggy, which was basically the same thing—but he’d torn the world apart twice to save the other Bucky and by God, he’d do it again for this one. “We were on a train, and then there were… Russians, I think? And… oh, Jesus,” he said, suddenly agitated, clawing at his left arm with his right one. “Fuck, Steve, get it off me, get it _off—”_

“We will, Buck,” Steve said, jumping up and pressing both of Bucky’s arms down to the mattress. Never mind that it had taken Shuri and a squad of Wakandan scientists to remove the wreckage of the same arm once, in preparation for its replacement; they’d cross that bridge when they came to it. “We will, if you want. But you’re real sick right now and we’ve gotta wait until you’re stronger, okay?”

Bucky blew out a breath. “Isn’t that usually my line?” he said, and then he squinted up at Steve. “Jesus. You look _old.”_

 _Yeah, all of thirty-seven, probably,_ Steve thought, with a mix of annoyance and amusement. But that did make him significantly older than Bucky for the first time in his life, which was a jarring thought. “Well, it’s, uh, it’s been a while, Buck. The war ended, in fact, while you were... under.”

Bucky blinked. “We win?”

Steve almost choked on a laugh. “Yeah, Buck, we won.”

“Well,” Bucky murmured, “that’s nice. When are you gonna make an honest woman of Carter, then?”

“Uh. You kind of missed the wedding, Bucky.”

“Son of a bitch. Had a toast ready that was gonna embarrass the hell out of you.”

Well, if Bucky was cracking jokes, it meant he was either okay, or close enough to see it from here. “Go back to sleep if you can. I’m gonna go get Howard,” he said, and, “We’re gonna take care of you, Buck,” and he couldn’t resist reaching down to squeeze Bucky’s shoulder, his right shoulder, so he could definitely feel it. 

He turned around to see Peggy standing in the doorway, but—like the spy she was—she melted into the shadows of the hall before Bucky could see her, letting him catch up with her when she was halfway to the stairs. “How do you think he is?” she asked, taking his arm in hers.

“Physically? Not great, but he’ll make it. Mentally, he’s… there. He’s been through a lot, but it’s him.” He’d test that theory more later, but his gut said this was still his original Bucky, the one he’d ripped the heart out of Hydra for in 1945. That was a Bucky he’d never expected to see again, and it was shaking him up more than he wanted to admit. 

“And how are you?” Peggy said, as if she’d read his mind.

“You gonna think I’m less of a man if I say I’m scared to death?”

Peggy made a little scoffing noise. “I’d think you were less of a man if you weren’t.”

“What about you? Are you okay?”

She did the noise again. “No thanks to you. ‘Peggy shouldn’t be on her feet,’ indeed.”

“Sorry.”

“Oh, it isn’t all bad. Now that I’m officially eating for two, I’ve spent the last few hours letting Ana stuff me full of her leftover Christmas pies. She can’t have children of her own, you know, and I was worried about how she’d take the news, but it seems she’s decided to throw herself into the role of Auntie. I’ve already had to tell her it’s a bit premature to start sewing the christening gown.”

Oh. That did explain some things. Steve found himself suddenly wondering which of the Jarvises Tony would actually name his AI after. “Do you think we could stay here a few days?” he asked.

“Where else would we go, when your friend is here? The housekeeper has already made up a room for us.”

“God, I’m so lucky to have you.”

“And don’t you forget it.” Peggy stood on her toes to kiss him once, quickly, and then she was gone again, leaving him to rather dazedly go looking for Howard again.

Steve had warned everyone not to go near Bucky without him present, but Ana was about as likely to listen to orders as Peggy, and the next morning, he checked in to discover that Peggy hadn’t been the only one to receive the Ana Jarvis treatment. Bucky had been dressed in a pair of Howard’s silk pajamas and situated in a little nest of pillows and blankets, and he was attacking a tray of what looked like a full English breakfast with a vigor that was somewhat alarming, given that Steve had exactly one (borrowed) clean shirt to work with. He still looked pretty ragged around the edges, but the penicillin and fluids were apparently buoying up Zola’s serum enough for his body to start fighting off whatever had gone wrong when he came out of cryo. “Forget it,” he said, misinterpreting the way Steve was eyeing the food, “I’m not sharing,” and shoved another forkful of sausage into his mouth. “So,” he added, around the bite, “nineteen-fifty-two, huh? So were you gonna tell me I was out for almost seven years or was I just supposed to read about that in the paper?”

“Can I try something?” Steve asked, sitting down by the bed.

“Sure,” Bucky said, without slowing down on the food, and Steve took a deep breath and looked at the piece of paper in his hand. 

_“Zhelaniye,”_ he read, carefully. _“Rzhavyy. Semnadtsat'. Rassvet.”_

Bucky look at him silently, saying nothing.

 _“Pech',”_ Steve continued, not sure whether he was hoping his pronunciation was or wasn’t good enough. _“Devyat'. Dobroserdechnyy. Vozvhashcheniye na rodinu. Odin.”_ He took one last breath, said, _“Gruzovoy vagon,”_ and sat back, waiting for the explosion.

“So, what, we’re commies now?” Bucky asked calmly, and when Steve looked at him in shocked silence, he shoved most of a grilled tomato into his mouth and chewed on it thoughtfully. “You’re not telling me what that was about,” he said, once he’d swallowed. “Means it’s bad, right?”

“It’s good for us,” Steve said. “It’s… hard to explain.”

“Try me,” Bucky said. “Nothing’s surprised me since Schmidt ripped off his face in ’forty-three.”

“All right,” Steve said. “While you were gone, I time-traveled to the future.”

Bucky stopped, with the fork halfway to his mouth, and looked at him. “Don’t suppose this is another test of yours,” he said, “is it?”

“I got frozen, like you did,” Steve pressed onward. “We both ended up in the 2010s. Hydra’d had you for a long time at that point. They made you… do things. Terrible things. Assassinations. Terrorism. None of those things were your fault, or your choice, but they used your body to do them.”

“Oh. So you actually came back to rescue me, and not just to grind Carter’s coffee.”

“Don’t talk about her like that,” Steve said, reddening. “I don’t expect you to believe me, _I_ hardly believe me, but could you just let me explain and _then_ tell me I’m a crazy idiot?”

Bucky put his fork down. “Rogers,” he said, “in the last… maybe a week, the way it seems to me, I fell off a train on a mountain, lost my fucking arm, got captured by Nazis who put a new metal arm on me, got rescued, and woke up to find my best friend looking ten years older and talking to me in Russian. The only reason I’m not losing my goddamn _mind_ right now is because Howard has me pumped full of something I can’t pronounce that’s supposedly what they use to calm down circus elephants, so maybe you should just spit it out and get it over with.”

So Steve told him everything.

Well. Once again, not _everything._ As much as he’d told Peggy, and maybe a little more. He left out most of the bad business with Tony, obviously, and the Snap, but even without it, there was a lot of ground to cover. Bucky listened to all of it, patiently, and at the end he said, “Huh.”

“Yeah.”

“And he—the future me—made you promise not to come back for the real me.”

That _real_ threw him, but from Bucky’s perspective, this was all an academic exercise, after all. “Yeah.”

“Good fucking thing Carter’s a hell of a lot smarter than you are, then, isn’t it?”

Bucky had raised his voice just enough that it would carry to anyone who happened to be listening in the hall, which told Steve two things: first, that his enhanced senses _were_ about as good as Steve’s, because Peggy’s step had been very light when she’d come in about halfway through; and second, that it really was entirely the same Bucky he’d left behind, no reprogramming, because Bucky couldn’t have been more deliberately goading her. She knew it, too, because she opened the door and walked in. “Thank you, Sergeant Barnes,” she said, taking the chair on the other side of the bed. “So what happens now?”

“Not that I’m not happy you brought me to Stark’s mansion and everything, but I think I’d like to get outta here before he blows something up,” Bucky said, and Peggy’s mouth curved in a smile. “Do I have to, I dunno, muster out or something?”

“Before you contact the Army,” Peggy said, “I think it’s only fair you should know that your family is currently splitting a generous pension from the SSR, based on your having been killed in action.”

“Where are they now?” Bucky asked.

“Your sister Rebecca married a Naval officer and moved to California after the war,” Peggy said, as if she’d been expecting the question. Well, of course she had. “Elizabeth joined the WAC, married a man she met on duty, and moved to Milwaukee. Ruth is enrolled at Bryn Mawr, planning to go into teaching, I’m told. We can contact any of them for you if you’d like.”

“No.” Bucky was firm. “Maybe once things settle. Once I even know where I’m gonna end up. I mean, hell, what’ve I really got to go back to in Brooklyn, anyway? Plus, you know…” He gestured at the metal arm. “This.”

Yeah, that. “Howard says that if he took it off, it would be irreversible,” Steve said, “but he’ll do it if that’s what you want.” Howard’s hesitation to essentially amputate a working limb had initially been at war with his desire to take the thing apart and see how it worked, but at the end of the day he’d reluctantly agreed that Bucky’s decision would be respected.

“So my choices are walking around with a killing machine attached to me or being crippled for the rest of my life?” Bucky said sharply. 

Steve tried not to cringe at the word, reminding himself that the Bucky of the future had had time to come to terms with losing his arm, among a lot of other things; this Bucky had barely had days. “If it helps,” he said, “the future you got to try it both ways, and he eventually decided he could do some good with it. I wouldn’t jump to any conclusions, if I were you. But as for where you’re gonna end up—”

“With us, of course,” Peggy said, as if that settled the matter. And at the end of the day, it did.

☆☆☆

When Bucky had recovered enough to be moved, they brought him home and put him in the guest room, and Steve, eyeing the tiny third bedroom he’d intended to convert into a nursery, thought that the house, which had felt like a mansion two weeks ago, suddenly seemed very small. Bucky seemed to be doing his best not to take up any space or ruffle any feathers, coming down for meals but otherwise mostly moving between his bed and a reading chair, although the shadows under his eyes, which were painfully reminiscent of the Winter Soldier’s eyeblack, made it clear that he wasn’t spending much of that time sleeping. Steve was probably the only person alive who could guess what he was going through, but just because he’d also lost a chunk of time and woken up in a world where he no longer had a job to do didn’t mean he necessarily had a healthy coping mechanism for it. The space-time continuum didn’t seem to have blown up, though, and Peggy, who was keeping a _very_ close eye on Zola now, reported that either he hadn’t figured out that his Soldier was missing or he’d learned to keep a hell of a poker face in the last seven years, so Steve decided he could stop worrying about the fate of the universe for the time being.

“Get your ass up and come help me,” he ordered, one afternoon. It was an unseasonably warm day in February, just warm enough to crack the windows in the soon-to-be nursery without burning through the rest of the week’s heating oil, and Bucky looked at the drop cloths, the paint buckets, and the paint roller Steve put in his hand with only vague comprehension. 

“What the hell is this?”

“I can see how you’d be confused by the futuristic technology of the paint roller.”

“I mean—” Bucky waved his hand around in confusion. “Something wrong with the color it is?”

“Peggy wants green for the nursery. Sorry, Peggy wants ‘Pale Meadow Mist’ for the nursery,” Steve corrected. “You do the walls, I’ll do around the trim,” he said, and Bucky, still bemused, dipped the roller in the paint and went to work.

It had always been the way they had their best conversations: both busy with their hands, neither having to look at the other. The amount of time they’d spent like this washing dishes, shining shoes, cleaning guns… Maybe he wouldn’t mention that last one. It didn’t always work, but Steve also wasn’t particularly surprised when, ten minutes into the job, Bucky broke the silence with, “I’ll be out of here before the baby comes, if that’s what you’re worried about.”

“I ask you for your help, that translates to kicking you out of the house somehow?” Steve said, keeping his tone neutral. 

“I gotta get out of your hair sometime. Peg says there’s a job at SHIELD she’s holding open for me.”

Steve swallowed his immediate reaction and asked, “Field work?” 

“God, no. Paper pushing. You know it takes six or seven support staff for every agent they send out the door?” Bucky paused, then added, “Bet you cost ol’ Colonel Phillips twice that just requisitioning the uniforms you went through.”

“Three times, easy,” Steve said, and Bucky’s laugh seemed to be as much of a surprise to him as it was to Steve. “But you should know the reason we went looking for you was because I told Peggy I couldn’t imagine my kids not knowing you.”

“They can know me, I just don’t have to live in your back pocket. You should be focused on her, anyway. You two picked out a name for the kid yet?”

“Don’t change the subject,” Steve said, surprising himself this time. He’d always let Bucky do that before, and maybe that had been part of his problem. He couldn’t help remembering how much happier the other Bucky, the future Bucky, had seemed during his brief respite in Wakanda, when no one was asking him to be anywhere near either fighting or spycraft. “Is riding a desk at SHIELD HQ really what you want to do?”

“Who the fuck else would have me with this?” Bucky said, waving his left hand vaguely. He hadn’t said any more about having it removed, but he hadn’t exactly come around to it as a miracle of modern science, either. “I gotta do somethin’ with the rest of my life.”

“Buck, you can do anything you want. You have a home here for as long as you want it, and we’re not hurting for money. God knows you covered the rent for me enough times when I couldn’t work, and don’t think I don’t know how often you lied about the doctors’ bills you paid so I wouldn’t feel like a charity case. This isn’t me offering you charity; this is me finally being in a position to even up the scales. And it isn’t like the old days—the Depression’s over, and you don’t have to take the first job that comes along. You could do anything you want. You could start a business. Go live on a farm, keep goats—”

“Goats?” Bucky’s laugh was louder this time. “Fuck if I’m ever gonna keep _goats.”_

“It doesn’t have to be goats! It could be… I just…” Steve didn’t recognize it as the flash of inspiration it was when he said it; he was just spitballing, as they said, scrambling for any of the things the future Bucky had done to try to keep on an even keel. “You could write,” he said. 

“What, stories like those hack books you illustrate the covers for?”

Steve had really been thinking about the future Bucky’s journal, which had been a safe and maybe slightly obsessive way of keeping his thoughts in order, not any kind of fiction, but his reflexes were too long ingrained to not immediately push back when Bucky started shit. “You _wish_ you could write like Dashiell Hammet or Al Bester,” he said.

“Pfft. Those guys haven’t seen shit compared to what we did with Hydra.”

“Didn’t say they had. Said they’re good writers. Last time you wrote a story, you were what, twelve?”

“Eighteen,” said Bucky, with a faraway look in his eyes that stopped Steve in his tracks. “It was pretty good, too. I was gonna get Bec to type it up, send it around to the magazines and see if anyone would bite.”

 _How’d you manage that without me knowing?_ Steve almost asked, and then he realized: that was the year his mother was dying. In retrospect, it had been the first of many times he’d been so caught up in his own shit that he hadn’t noticed what was going on with Bucky. He was determined not to let it happen again. “Why’d you stop?” he asked.

“I brought up college one time, and Ma said we had six mouths to feed and Dad needed help at the shipping company, was what. And then Pearl Harbor, and _you_ running your mouth about how art school just didn’t seem important anymore…”

“And you listened why? At the time, I seem to remember you saying I was an idiot.” Steve thought about it. “Tell you what, take a couple months, try writing again. You change your mind, Peggy’s always gonna need guys she can trust to do those desk jobs.”

“You’re crazy, Rogers,” Bucky said, but Steve knew him well enough to know that wasn’t necessarily a _no._ He went back to making short, even brush strokes, while the walls around him slowly turned green like spring. 

“Can I ask you somethin’?” Steve heard Bucky say to Peggy, while she was standing at the sink, doing the washing-up. Steve had gone upstairs to take a stab at assembling a kit he’d bought into a working cradle for the baby, and Bucky probably thought even super-hearing wouldn’t be enough to pick out individual words at this distance. It might not have if he hadn’t been at the top of the stairs, about to come down and get a screwdriver, when Bucky’s next words stopped him. “How much of the whole time-travel story do you believe?”

There was a _clink_ as Peggy set a plate in the dish rack. “All of it,” she said simply. “Steve is the worst liar I’ve ever met, Barnes. You of all people ought to know that. Now, if you’re going to just stand there, why don’t I wash and you dry?”

“I didn’t say he was lying.” There was a metallic sound Steve couldn’t place at first, until he realized it was the sound of Bucky carefully lifting a glass with the metal hand he still didn’t quite trust. “I said how much do _you_ believe. You don’t think maybe he was like me, just got captured somewhere and… kind of went off the rails a little bit, do you?”

There was a pause, and then, “No,” Peggy said, “I don’t believe that. What little he’s told me that I’ve been able to verify has checked out. Most of which involved you, by the way. You can’t seriously think he’s delusional. He’s too much _himself_ for that.”

“I just think, if the only thing you’ve been able to check up on is the Hydra stuff, it’s worth asking whether it might be stuff he heard while somebody had him, or… I dunno, Carter. I know I shouldn’t say this when I have a Hydra weapon grafted onto my _body,_ but that stuff about me in the future? It’s a lot to ask a guy to swallow.”

“And yet, it’s not that much stranger than some of the things I’ve seen in the SSR even just since the war ended. The world is changing, Barnes, and the hardest lesson any of us learns is that most of the time we have to take it as it is, and not how we’d like it to be. That way we can save our strength for the fights that really matter.”

“Yeah, that’s real profound and everything, but Steve ain’t exactly known for his grasp on reality.”

Peggy’s laugh was rich and bright. “Steve is the exception to every rule I’ve ever come across, that’s true. But I’m not afraid for him, and I don’t believe you need to be, either. Try to trust him a little bit, Bucky.”

“I do trust him. I just think he’s an idiot,” Bucky said flatly.

Anything else he might have said after that was drowned in her laughter, and Steve, listening to the two people he loved most in the world being safe and okay and together, had to shut his eyes for a minute and fight tears, because his heart was just so goddamn full.

In bed that night, he said, “You know, I overheard you talking to Bucky after dinner. Thanks for the things you said,” and Peggy shut the book she was reading and turned her full attention to him.

“You’re welcome,” she said, “and thank _you_ for talking to him about the job. I was only thinking of how to help him feel useful—not that I think he needs to be, but I think _he_ feels he needs to be. It hadn’t occurred to me that he might say yes out of obligation.”

“I don’t think he was. Seems like all three of us thought he needed a push. Honestly, I was afraid you’d be mad at me for poaching him.”

“Not at all. Although poor William will likely be very disappointed.”

“William, your assistant? Why? Was Bucky supposed to help him out?”

“After a manner of speaking. They’re like-minded young men, and I thought they might hit it off.”

Steve was very quiet for a minute after that, the wheels in his head spinning furiously. “You shouldn’t joke about things like that, Peg,” he finally said.

“And that, darling, is why I said you’re a terrible liar.” She snuggled up and kissed him, in a no-hard-feelings sort of way. “You always thought you were covering for him so well, but I knew almost from that first night in the pub. It took a bit longer to figure out what was going on with you, but then, you didn’t seem to know what to make of it yourself. I hope you know I don’t think any less of him because of it. My uncle Harold was like him—a confirmed bachelor, was my mother’s polite phrase—and he was one of my favorite people in the world.”

“All right, you figured it out,” Steve said, trying to stay calm, although his heart was hammering so hard that he was surprised she couldn’t hear it. He hadn’t seriously thought she’d have a problem with it, but he also hadn’t seriously thought it would come up. “Thanks for not… Thanks. But what do you mean, what was going on with me?”

Peggy looked into his eyes for long enough that he had to fight an urge to squirm and look away like a guilty kid. Then her face broke into an expression he rarely saw on her, equal parts delighted and horrified with nothing in between. “Oh, you _ninny,”_ she said. “You absolute _dunce._ You’ve still got no idea that you love him too, do you?”

“Of course I love him! He’s my best friend, only not… I…” Flailing, he said, “I think it’s pretty obvious I’ve only got eyes for you, Peg. If you’re worried that something might happen—”

“Darling, if I’d felt threatened by him, I could have kept my rival out of your life forever simply by agreeing with you and doing nothing. The truth is, I’ve been rather hoping something _would_ happen so that I could join in.”

“Oh my God, Peggy, you can’t mean that! Are you sure this isn’t just the preg—” was as far as Steve’s mouth got before his brain caught up. Good thing, too: she was giving him the Look. “Okay, that was a stupid thing to say.”

“Yes. And I don’t want you to think that you're not enough for me, either. If it really doesn’t interest you, that’s fine. Take it as my telling you about a wild fantasy I’ve got and leave it at that. But one of the many things I love about you is that you don’t let the proper get in the way of the good. And believe me…” Peggy grinned at him wickedly. “Based on a few things I heard during that month we spent working out of Paris, I have reason to think it might be _very_ good.”

“I…” Steve’s mouth was dry. “Can I have some time to think about it?”

“You’d know that better than I would, wouldn’t you?” Peggy said, and it took him a minute to realize she was actually joking about the whole time-travel thing. “I don’t mean to make you uncomfortable, Steve. I just think Bucky may not be the only one who sometimes needs a little push when it comes to his own happiness.”

“Yeah, speaking of that,” Steve said, “how do you know _he’s_ even interested in… what you’re proposing.”

“Oh, my darling,” Peggy said, with a laugh. “I was wrong when I said you didn’t know the first thing about women. The truth is, you don’t know the first thing about people,” and then she had the nerve to snuggle against him and drift off to sleep, warm and soft in his arms, before he could reply.

☆☆☆

Oh, he thought about it, all right. Once he got started, he doubted he’d ever stop thinking about it. And the more he thought about it, the more he thought… well, maybe he _was_ interested, if Peggy was serious, and if Bucky was willing. He wasn’t sure at what point exactly the _if_ of approaching Bucky rolled over into a _when,_ but Peggy seemed to know it had; the little glances she’d shoot him occasionally—across the living room when he was reading, or when Bucky would vanish upstairs after dinner and they’d hear the keys on the Royal typewriter she’d brought home for him start to clack, or when the clock struck ten and she’d announce that she was going up to bed—seemed to be asking, _Tonight?_ and expressing something that might have been disappointment each time his answering look said, _No._ And that was where they stood when life threw him another curveball.

“Grant,” Howard said, cornering him on his way in to pick up Peggy for lunch, “there’s someone I want you to meet,” and shoved him into a room with a man in his fifties, suited and moustached and looking startlingly similar to how Howard himself would look fifteen years down the line. “Walt, this is Steve Grant, the one I was telling you about,” and Steve abruptly found himself shaking hands with Walt Disney.

“It… it’s an honor to meet you, sir,” he said, once he’d recovered his powers of speech. Leave it to Howard to spring this on him, introducing him to one of his childhood goddamn heroes without a second to think. “Your films were a huge influence on me when I was a teenager, one of the biggest reasons I kept going with my own art. The things you did with _Fantasia_ were brilliant, absolutely visionary,” and then, because his mouth never, ever, not once failed to outpace his brain, he heard himself add, “Although I didn’t care for the racist overtones in _Song of the South._ I have to tell you, that one isn’t going to hold up well in the future.”

It wasn’t every day that a single human being got to stand in front of two of the richest men in America and watch one of them war between a desire to laugh and a desire to punch him. But in the end, Disney gave a short huff that barely fell below the threshold of laughter, and said, “Well, you weren’t wrong, Stark. I won’t have to worry about this one being a yes man.”

“Sir?” Steve said, suddenly walking his own line between puzzled and annoyed.

“I’ve been showing Walt your work,” Howard said, gesturing to several of his covers—mostly published books, but also a few that had evidently been lifted straight from his own easel back at the house, and some of those pieces had _deadlines,_ dammit; if Howard had damaged them, there were going to be _words_ —fanned out across a desk. “So what’s the verdict, Mr. Imagineer?”

Disney gave Steve another long, speculative look, but at the end of this one, he smiled. “I’d say the job is his if he wants it.”

“Job,” Steve repeated.

“Walt’s working on a new picture. All about dogs, very adorable, the children of this great nation will eat it up like ice cream,” said Howard, who wasn’t, as far as Steve could tell, a dog person, a pet person, or a living-things-he-had-to-be-responsible-for-in-any-way person. “He’s looking for some fresh blood on the character designs. Are you in?”

As it happened, _Lady and the Tramp_ was a movie that Steve had meant to start watching countless times, but for one reason or another, he’d never gotten around to crossing off his list. Which meant… he could, in good conscience, take this one, without feeling like he was ruining history. “I can’t say dogs are really in my line,” he said, gesturing at the nearest of the covers: a futuristic city with a spaceship breaking orbit overhead, pointing toward the stars. “But… it’s a hard offer to say no to.”

“Then don’t say no, son,” Disney said, clapping a hand on his shoulder. (Steve tried not to snort with laughter, and wasn’t entirely successful, but Disney had undoubtedly seen weirder from star-struck artists.) “Come to Burbank. Doesn’t have to be a lifetime commitment, but promise me three months, and we’ll set you and the missus up in a bungalow. She’ll love the sunshine and you’ll love working for Disney Pictures.”

“I’m sorry, sir, but there’s just no way. I’m surprised Howard didn’t mention this, but my wife is one of the founders of SHIELD, and her work—”

“—Can be done out of the L.A. branch,” Howard said. “She’s been there, she loves it. Just ask her.” Howard leaned in close. “Tell her I’ve got a friend out there named Rebecca Gonzales who she’d love to meet.”

“For heaven’s sake, Howard,” Steve began, and then he stopped. _Becca._ “I’ll ask her,” he said. “But she gets the final decision.”

“Give me forty-eight hours,” Howard told both of them.

“Well, I think he ought to do it,” said Peggy, over dinner. “What do you think, Bucky?”

“It’s his dream,” Bucky said, helping himself to a slice of pot roast. “He’s an idiot if he _doesn’t_ take it. Which isn’t to say he will, but if he’s serious about coming back here to make a life for himself, like he says, then he should think about what it means to turn down the chance of a lifetime.”

“You don’t have to talk about me like I’m not here. Pass the potatoes, Buck?”

“Not until you call Disney and take the job.”

Steve reached across the table and grabbed the bowl himself, but not before Bucky got his metal hand on it, which resulted in a brief, undignified scuffle. “If we go,” he said, once the potatoes were in his possession, “are you gonna visit Becca?”

“I don’t see how this has anything to do with me. You two make up your minds, _then_ I’ll decide what I’m gonna do. What’s it gonna be, Peg?”

“Well, going now is out of the question for me,” Peggy said. “I’ve got to see at least four cases wrapped up at SHIELD before I do anything. Besides, it doesn’t make sense to sell the house until we know if Mister Brooklyn here will even be able to tolerate California.”

“I’ve been to California.”

“Getting off a bus for two hours during a USO tour doesn’t count as _being_ anywhere, darling. It’s obvious what we’ve got to do.” Peggy speared a bite of broccoli on her fork and said, “You’ll go to Burbank, and if you decide to stay, I’ll have plenty of time to pack up here and join you before the baby comes.”

“Peggy!” Steve blurted, in astonishment.

“It’s the only sensible path forward, Steve. Bucky is right; you can’t pass up this opportunity. Between Bucky and the Jarvises, it isn’t as if I won’t be well cared for.”

“But…”

“What’s holding you back, Rogers?” Bucky asked suddenly. “Afraid you might actually be happy for a minute? Look, you said Peggy got the final word on this. Sounds to me like she’s made up her mind. What’s the problem?”

“The problem is, I’ve just put together a life here and I’m maybe not ready to uproot it again even if it _is_ for something even bet—” Steve stopped. “Well,” he said, quietly, “when you put it that way, it just sounds stupid.”

Usually Bucky would have jumped on a statement like that, but today he and Peggy just looked at each other smugly across the table. Maybe putting his two favorite people in a house together hadn’t been his brightest idea ever. “So if I go,” he said, “what does that look like?”

“Just what Mr. Disney suggested,” Peggy said. “Go and get a little bungalow, work for three months, come back and tell us what you think.”

“And you don’t have any feelings about moving to California, one way or another?” Steve asked suspiciously. “Because if Howard talked you into this—” 

“Do you really think I’d let that man talk me into anything that went against my own better judgment? Anyhow, you overestimate my ties to New York, darling. I came here after the war to feel close to you, not out of any affection for the place, and while I’ve grown to like it quite well,” she added, holding up a hand to stop Bucky, who was opening his mouth to come to Brooklyn’s defense, “what I’m interested in now is being where you are, not the place itself.”

Steve looked at Bucky, hoping for… well, maybe not the same kind of declaration, but it bothered him that Bucky wouldn’t commit, one way or the other. Maybe he just hadn’t suspected until now that Bucky’d had one foot out the door since they brought him out of cryo; maybe that was why he’d been so hesitant to say anything that might spook him. Maybe a little break from dutifully following that little guy from Brooklyn was just what he needed… or maybe this would be his excuse to cut and run. Steve was smart enough to know it would have to be Bucky’s own choice, just like joining the Howlies had been, but that didn’t mean he had to _like_ it. “Okay,” he said slowly. “Then I guess, after supper, I’ll call Disney.” 

“Yeah, you will,” said Bucky. “Now quit acting tragic and pass the goddamn butter.”

☆☆☆

California was… something. Steve had no idea how to feel about going from the chilly, damp spring of Brooklyn to the bright, dry warmth of Burbank. All of the colors were different—even the _light_ was different—and nobody went anywhere without a car, which was the thing that bothered him most. Howard loaned him Jarvis to drive him around, and Steve tried to bite his tongue about fossil fuels and pollution and just appreciate that both of them were trying to do something nice for him. 

The Disney studio, on the other hand, was amazing. He kept thinking of Tony telling Bruce about the R&D labs at Stark Industries: “Candyland,” he’d called it, an allusion Steve hadn’t understood until he’d seen the brightly colored boxes on a shelf at Woolworth’s in 1951. Disney was like that for him: creative people being sent out to look at things, just _look_ at them and _think_ about them, then hunching over desks for hours, perfecting the tiniest points of a design, until they showed them off in a burst of triumph. 

They gave him a list of characters for the movie, and he worked long into the slow Los Angeles dusks, as late as he could manage before Jarvis came to drag him back to Howard’s house (because Ana, hearing that he was to be put up in a bachelor pad near the studio, had outright rebelled, installing him in a spare bedroom of the mansion where she could stuff him with food to her heart’s content). And slowly but surely, a whole menagerie of creatures came alive under his pencils. He drew the elegant Lady, whose eyes and brows were drawn straight from Peggy at her softest; a brash, scruffy stray named Tramp, who he wouldn’t realize, until he saw his design animated onscreen, had the same cocky self-assurance as a teenaged Bucky, swanning fearlessly around Brooklyn; Jock, a terrier with Dum-Dum Dugan’s moustache (although they made him scrap the idea of giving a dog a bowler hat); and a host of furry others. At one point, Disney (who he was stunned to find himself calling “Walt”) swung by his desk with orders to add a human chef whose restaurant the dogs would visit looking for scraps, and Steve took an intense, subversive pleasure in drawing not one, but two characters from his own life: Antonio and Guiseppe, who’d owned a little bistro a few blocks from where he grew up and who had, in retrospect, almost certainly been a couple, and not cousins as they claimed. No, it wasn’t lifesaving work, but seeing the excitement of the artists around him, and of the occasional child who’d been given the supreme honor of visiting the studio, he began to remember why he’d started drawing in the first place. It was no longer an outlet for trauma, or just a way to pay the bills; it was the pure joy of creating something out of nothing, knowing it was a triumph if it made one person look at the world a little differently, or even just lightened up a dark day enough to make them smile. 

He was arguing, heatedly, with one of the animators—he’d drawn the feline villains of the second act as a pair of mischievous calico cats named Nip and Tuck, and this sonuvabitch had had the nerve to redraw them into a pair of viciously Orientalist caricatures with the unsubtle names Si and Am; Steve suspected he was going to lose this battle, but for the sake of Morita’s kids, three years and eighteen months old respectively, he was damned if he wasn’t going to make a stink about it—when Jarvis silently appeared at his elbow, in the way of all good butlers, saying, “Mr. Grant, I’m afraid an urgent matter requires your attention.”

“Give me five minutes to make this idiot see reason, J.,” said Steve, momentarily forgetting that this Jarvis didn’t appreciate familiarity as much as the one who spoke to him through ceilings in the future.

“It’s about your wife, sir,” Jarvis said, and Steve took one look at his face and headed for the parking lot at a dead run.

“Oh, for—I’ve told you a hundred times, I’m fine,” Peggy’s voice carried down the hospital corridor, just loud enough for his super-hearing to register, and it was _her_ enough that Steve slowed his pace enough to dodge around the empty wheelchair that was right in his way, rather than leaping over it.

“Say that one more time and I’m gonna sit on you like I useta sit on Steve,” a voice replied, in a low growl that it took him a minute to recognize as Bucky’s. Peggy only coughed in reply, and Steve skidded around the corner, where at least he managed to stop in the doorway instead of tripping and faceplanting onto the bed. And… the thing was, Peggy did look fine, despite being tucked into a hospital bed, wearing a robe that Bucky must have brought from home over one of those dreadful hospital gowns. The most shocking thing about the scene, in fact, was that she looked pregnant now, which she hadn’t when he’d left. It shouldn’t have surprised him, of course, but it did—and reassured him, at the same time, although he still crossed the room and took the second chair by the bed without realizing he was doing it until her hand was in his. 

“Are you okay? Is the baby—”

“They will both _live,_ although Peggy is not _okay,_ Steve; she has fresh stitches, so no jostling.” Bucky gave him a fiercely protective glare that was a little unnerving; until now, he’d usually seen it directed at other people who might inadvertently hurt _him._ “The shot was a through-and-through with a low-caliber bullet, which we all know is what?”

“Better, because it causes less damage,” Steve replied, the old call-and-response of Howlie field medicine. Given that it was what they’d said to reassure people who had holes all the way through them, it wasn’t that reassuring to hear when it involved Peggy. “Where?” 

“Upper thigh,” Bucky answered for her, which prompted her to glare at him. “Missed all the arteries. For an assassin, the motherfucker was a lousy shot.”

“Language,” Steve said, with a glare of his own. “Was it Hydra?”

“No,” said Peggy, jumping in before Bucky could interrupt her again. “It was Leviathan, a Russian program with some fairly distinctive agents.”

“They cut their voice boxes out,” Bucky said disgustedly.

 _“Some_ of them,” Peggy corrected. “Not all, but this one, yes, he had the characteristic scar.”

“Had. So he’s—”

“Eliminated,” Bucky said, with a hard look in his eyes.

“Shit. Buck…” Steve looked at him helplessly. “Thank you,” he said, knowing it was insufficient. 

“Don’t. Carter’s the one who throat-punched him and then kicked him in the groin. I just made the kill shot. That gun in the breakfront’s a disgrace, by the way. Surprised it even fired. We never would’ve let that slide in the Army.”

“They came for you at _home,”_ Steve said, his own eyes narrowing.

“And a good thing too,” said Peggy, “first, since Bucky was there to help me, and second, so that we can keep it that much quieter. This is the sort of thing that undermines a woman’s authority if it gets out. We’ll put it out at work that I’ve simply had a fall.”

“Undermines your _authority?”_ Steve repeated, in disbelief.

“Anybody who wants her gone will say she’s endangering the baby by keeping her job,” Bucky said, rolling his eyes. “Which in one way I agree with, but in another, she’s cheesed off enough folks that they won’t stop coming if she quits. At least she goes to work in a secure location, although I think she oughta have a security detail when she leaves the house, at least until we know nobody else is gonna try anything stupid.”

“I suppose that’s reasonable,” Peggy said, looking pissy about it. “And you,” she added, turning to Steve. “It was Howard who told you, I suppose, despite my very explicit instructions that you were _not_ to drop everything and rush back here on the first flight—”

“It was his private plane,” Steve said.

“Good God, the experimental one? How do you think I would have felt if he’d crashed that thing over Nevada with you in it?”

“I’m gonna get out of your hair,” Bucky said, standing up. Steve reached across the bed and shoved him back down. 

“Stay so she doesn’t kill me,” he said, and leaned his head on Peggy’s shoulder, wrapping her up in a carefully non-jostling hug. “I’m so sorry, Peggy. I should have been—”

“Say it and Barnes’s intervention won’t be enough to stop your murder,” Peggy said, putting her arms around him in answer. “Now, get me out of this horrible _thing_ and take me home, please. The doctors have said I’ll be more comfortable there.”

“After she bullied them into it,” Bucky observed, a little less judgmentally, Steve thought, than he would have if it had been Steve with the gunshot wound. But they took her home anyway.

☆☆☆

Steve carried Peggy to the bedroom, careful of her bandaged thigh, and settled her into bed while Bucky went up and down the stairs fetching things for her: her book, her favorite blanket, water to take her pain pills with, tea and a biscuit to keep her strength up. After she ordered them out, declaring that she couldn’t take either of them looking at her pathetically any longer, Steve reluctantly left her and went downstairs to tidy up the living room… which was easier said than done. It hadn’t occurred to him until that moment that they might be coming home to a corpse he’d have to dispose of, but evidently SHIELD had been there and done a cursory cleanup of the scene—although they’d left behind a broken window, a damaged chair, several china figurines that had fallen and shattered, and more than a few blood spatters on the hardwood floor. At least Bucky had made his kill shot over the rug, or so he presumed from the fact that it was missing; the cleanup crew must have carried the would-be assassin out rolled up in it, which was a shame, because it had been a nice rug. He hoped none of the neighbors had been watching; he didn’t care, but Peggy would definitely care, and wow, okay, now he understood why people got so aggravated with him when _he_ used to get shot and then complain about having to go through the hassle of getting blood out of his uniform.

He was looking for a piece of cardboard to put over the window when he heard a sound outside and immediately went on high alert, but then he realized: _Bucky._ He went out through the kitchen door, where he found Bucky on his knees, looking shakier and paler than Peggy had through this whole ordeal, hunched over a fresh puddle of vomit at the bottom of Peggy’s favorite rose bush.

“Okay, you’ve gotta stop doing that,” Steve said, hauling Bucky to his feet and slinging an arm around him. “Looks like Peggy isn’t the only one who could use tea and a biscuit. Hey, whoa,” he said, because Bucky looked like he was about to lose it again and goddamn it, there was a _limit._ “Here,” he said, steering Bucky to the sink and filling a glass with water. 

Bucky rinsed his mouth out, spat, but didn’t look any better. “Steve,” he said, “what happened tonight, it was… I was… I…”

“It’s okay, Buck,” Steve said, laying his hand flat between Bucky’s shoulders and rubbing up and down, the way his mother used to do when his asthma acted up. “I know it’s been a while since you’ve had to do anything like this, but you’re here now. You’re safe. It’s 1952, you’re in Brooklyn, you’re—”

“I’m in love with Peggy,” Bucky blurted.

Steve felt his whole body go rigid with shock. “Buck?” he said.

He’d spoken softly, but Bucky’s whole body twitched like he’d taken a punch. “I didn’t mean for this to happen,” he said. “I don’t know _how_ it happened. I didn’t think… I didn’t even know it _could_ happen for me, with a woman. She didn’t do anything, Steve, it’s not her fault, it’s mine and I’m gonna leave, I can be out of here by morning, I just—”

“Shut the fuck up,” Steve said, and kissed him.

It was not, objectively, a good kiss. He’d imagined that Bucky’s mouth, which he’d studied from every angle and drawn a thousand times in the old days, would be soft and yielding and maybe have an undertone of sweetness, like the sugar in coffee. Instead, Bucky just stood there, not responding at all, and the best Steve could say for the taste of him was that it wasn’t awful. When Steve pulled away, sooner than he wanted to but not as soon as he should have given Bucky’s total lack of reaction, he took a shaky breath and said, in a voice that was barely a whisper, “What the hell…?”

“I was trying to decide how to bring this up to you,” Steve said, “but I guess I’ll have to wing it. Come with me.” He took Bucky’s hand and, when Bucky didn’t move, tugged on it, then looped Bucky’s arm through his. “Come on,” he repeated, as he threw the bolt and chain on the door. He pulled the living room curtains on his way past; he’d spoken Peggy’s second-in-command before they left the hospital and knew SHIELD had sent agents to keep an eye on things, so it was less about security than privacy. Not that they would have sent anyone who’d be either easily shocked or indiscreet, but he wasn’t thrilled with the idea of giving even one of Peggy’s subordinates something to talk about.

He got Bucky as far as the upstairs hallway before he stopped again, frozen in place. “What’s wrong with me?” he asked, still in that shaky voice. “I tried for _years,_ I tried to feel something for every girl in Brooklyn, it finally works out and it has to be the one who’s married to you.” A short pause later, he added, “You shouldn’t have... done that, Steve. I know you’re just trying to make this okay whatever way you can, but—”

“Bucky,” Steve said, “there’s nothing wrong with you now, and there never has been. Peggy and I, we’ve talked about this. We _want_ this. We want _you.”_

“Yes, we do,” Peggy shouted from the bedroom. “So you might as well come in here and talk through all these very complicated feelings of yours where I can hear you properly, as opposed to pretending you’ve gotten any better at stealth than you were when you were blowing up Panzers in the War.”

Steve laughed before he could stop himself and propelled Bucky forward through the doorway. “Peggy,” he said, “tell Bucky how long we’ve been talking about having him join us in here.”

“Oh, since well before Steve went to California,” Peggy said easily. “Although I admit, I was starting to doubt he’d ever work up the courage to tell you. Have you kissed yet?”

“Yes,” said Steve.

“You might have let me watch.”

“Sorry,” Steve said, while Bucky looked back and forth between them like they’d both lost their minds. “Should we do it again?”

“Absolutely not,” said Peggy. “Let me have a turn. Bucky, come here.”

She was using her Director of SHIELD voice, and Bucky took an involuntary step forward before he stopped himself. “If you’re kidding me—if this is some kind of a prank—”

“Bucky,” Steve said, frowning. “You know us better than that.”

Bucky watched his face for a moment, as if he hardly dared to hope; then he said, gruffly, “Guess you’re not, because I’d know that damn ‘Captain America is disappointed’ look anywhere,” and Peggy laughed as he approached the bed. He was moving cautiously, as if he was approaching an animal that might snap, and Steve finally gave him a shove forward to where Peggy was motioning for him to sit on the bed beside her. “I know it’s hard, but try to trust us a little bit, my dear,” she said, turning her mouth up to him. 

Bucky leaned down as she tilted her chin up and closed her eyes, and Steve thought, well, that was what he got for not asking first, because this was the kiss Steve had imagined. It was soft and slow and almost timid, which wasn’t a word he normally associated with Bucky. He’d wondered if he would feel jealous watching this, but he hadn’t expected it would be because he wanted Bucky doing that to _him._ Well, at least that clarified things on one front, while completely confusing them on another. Then Peggy patted the comforter on her other side, and said, “Come along, Steve,” and he followed Bucky forward.

“Careful,” Bucky said, with that protective hunch to his shoulders, as Steve eased himself down on the side of bed nearest to Peggy’s bandaged thigh. “No jostling.” 

“No jostling,” Steve agreed, and then Peggy’s mouth was on his and oh. _Oh._ This was good. Anyone without the serum might not have noticed it, but it added a whole new dimension to kiss her with the faint taste of someone else on her lips. “Is this okay with everybody so far? Peggy, Buck, are we good?”

“I’d be happier if I was on that side,” Bucky mock-grumbled.

Steve laughed, which _did_ jostle the bed enough to make Peggy flinch. “Okay, fine, we’ll switch,” he began, and felt his cheeks heat up when he realized what he’d said, although probably neither of them knew what that meant. Hell, some of the words he needed probably hadn’t been invented yet. He was so busy thinking about how he was going to approach that issue that he didn’t realize that Bucky had come around to his side of the bed, grabbed him by both shoulders, and was kissing him again, firmly, with his tongue slipping into Steve’s mouth before he knew what had hit him. When he pulled away, their lips parted with an audible _pop._

 _“That,”_ Bucky said smugly, “is how you kiss someone who isn’t expecting it, Rogers,” and Steve momentarily lost his sense of direction and bashed his shin on the cedar chest at the end of the bed.

Bucky grabbed him and kept him from falling on his face, which left Peggy free to laugh so hard that, by the time Bucky had steered him to the other side of the bed and then returned, she had tears in her eyes. “Okay, okay, so that was hilarious,” Steve groused, and then, in a stroke of inspiration, unbuttoned his shirt and shrugged out of it, which drew both of their eyes back to him immediately. Considering he still sometimes felt he hadn’t properly earned this body, he hadn’t expected to enjoy that as much as he did. His undershirt followed the shirt to the floor, and then his pants followed that, and yeah, now Bucky seemed to be unable to tear his eyes away from _him,_ which was why he couldn’t help smirking as he slid under the covers next to Peggy. “Well?” he said, crossing his arms over his chest. “You coming?”

Bucky’s cheeks went furiously red at that, and his hand went to the collar of his shirt, then stopped. “Could we, uh… put the lights off, you think?”

 _The arm. Of course._ Steve had gotten a good look at the full extent of the damage in Wakanda, but he didn’t think that would be a useful thing to bring up, and Peggy hadn’t seen it at all. He glanced at her, and of course she was mouthing the answer to him already. “Candles,” he agreed, and reached over to grab a couple of half-burned tapers from the drawer of the bedside table. By the time he’d jammed them into holders, struck a match, and lit both, Bucky had flipped off the light switch and was taking off his own shirt, with his metal shoulder turned carefully away from both of them. His pants were already off, which Steve was sorry he’d missed. He was cautious as he got into the bed, freezing immediately when he brushed against Peggy’s injured leg. 

“Does it hurt?” he asked, reaching out as if he was going to touch the bandage, then drawing back.

“Not as much as you’d think. The shot they gave me at the hospital hasn’t worn off yet. You can touch, just be gentle.”

The look he gave her was the same look he’d given Steve every time he’d ever told Bucky to be careful: _you think I don’t_ know _that?_ “Here,” he said, and took one of the pillows, lifting her gently and tucking it under and around her before he lay down, so he wouldn’t hurt her accidentally—and if Steve had let himself think for a second about what Hydra had done to Bucky, who’d never wanted to be anything but gentle, he would have gone into a blinding rage. He kissed Peggy instead, along her jawline, just below her ear, where he knew she liked it. Then he shot Bucky a look that invited him to follow suit, and Bucky did, looking like he’d died and gone to heaven when his lips met Peggy’s neck.

“Oh,” Peggy said, soft and breathless, “oh, that _is_ nice,” and Steve thought, no, he was definitely the one in heaven.

Bucky’s preferences might have run to men as a rule, but he certainly wasn’t having any trouble finding his way around Peggy’s body. He was already working his way downward, and she moaned when his mouth found her nipple. Steve followed suit, keeping his mouth on her neck while he cupped her other breast with his hand. It was a little fuller than it had been the last time he’d done this, a little heavier, and it was amazing how her body could have been perfect before it started changing and still be perfect now. He gave it a gentle squeeze, and she looked at him with dark eyes that gleamed in the candlelight, smirked, and tangled her fingers in Bucky’s hair, giving a tug that got a wordless, almost breathless groan out of him as he tipped his head back and looked up at her.

“Watch what Steve is going to do,” she ordered, and Steve knew what she wanted. He slid his hand down along the expanded curve of her belly, so familiar and so new all at once, and slipped two fingers into the warm wetness between her thighs. 

Bucky watched, all right; he looked as if he couldn’t tear his eyes away, even when Peggy gave his hair another yank and he seemed to remember where he was and put his mouth on her again. This, Steve had been as surprised as anyone to discover, was something he was good at. He took his time, stroking her slowly inside and out, while she arched her back and pulled him down to kiss her mouth again. And then, when she let out the breathy little moan that meant she was unbearably close, he pulled back and said, “Go ahead, Buck.”

Bucky stared at him, flicking his tongue over wet lips, nervously. “Should I—”

“Yes,” Peggy said, pressing his head down, and dear God, why had Steve hesitated for so long when he could have had _this_ all this time? He had no earthly idea if Bucky had ever done this before, but if he hadn’t, he was a hell of a quick study, based on the things that were happening to Peggy’s face while Bucky worked his mouth against the softness under her thatch of dark curls. Steve was dimly aware that he’d been painfully hard himself for a while now, and he honestly thought he might lose his mind when Peggy’s whole body bucked upward and she bit down on his shoulder to muffle a scream. “Oh,” she moaned, low and ragged, and then, “Oh, yes, _yes, Bucky,_ Bucky, yes.”

When she fell back to the bed, entirely limp and spent, Bucky, moving carefully, pulled the blankets back up over her and started to curl up beside her. His face looked like he thought he was the one who’d been given a gift, but Peggy wasn’t finished with him yet. “Now,” she said, between deep gasping breaths, giving Steve a little shove in Bucky’s direction, “darling, I think it’s your turn.”

And now Steve had no idea what she wanted, but he knew what _he_ wanted, and for once, he was going to go for it. He pulled Bucky up from the bed and sat him down on top of the cedar chest, arranging him so that he was leaning back on his elbows, knees bent. Peggy wanted a show? Oh, Peggy was going to get a show, all right. Bucky was still stunned enough about the whole arrangement to be more pliable than he normally was, but he didn’t seem to have any idea what to expect until Steve leaned over him, grabbing his ass with one hand and his dick with the other, and took the whole length of him into his mouth. 

“Steve,” Bucky said, low and shaky, and it seemed to him that he’d been waiting his whole life to hear Bucky say his name like that.

He didn’t have any experience on the giving end of this, but he knew what he liked when Peggy did it, so he did his best to copy a few of his particular favorites. Bucky panted silently, a sheen of sweat breaking out on his skin to match the gleam of his metal arm in the candlelight, and then he said, “Steve,” and, no, _that_ was the voice Steve wanted—and then Steve got to spend a few puzzling seconds figuring out the logistics of the whole swallowing thing, but in the end he got there. After that, it was almost anticlimactic to finish himself off with a few quick strokes, while Bucky flopped over backward, staring, not at him, but at Peggy. “Did you teach him that?” he asked, in a raspy, jagged voice.

“I certainly hope so.”

 _“Thank you,”_ Bucky said, sincerely, and Peggy’s laugh was like silk.

“Thank me by never telling my Nana about how we defiled her hope chest. Steven? Are you all right down there?”

“Yeah,” Steve said. “Just gonna lie here for, uh, about a week, I think.”

“More room for me, then,” Bucky said, getting up and sliding back into the bed. Dammit, he knew Steve too well; that smug tone was just about the only thing that could have gotten him to get off the floor, wipe himself off (hell, that shirt was going in the laundry anyway), and rejoin his two… what were they supposed to call each other as a collective, now? 

“Partners,” Peggy said, which was the first time he realized he’d spoken the thought out loud. “This only works if we’re all getting something satisfying out of it. Which I certainly am, but I expect both of you to speak up if anything is troubling you, agreed?”

“You mean we’re gonna keep doing this?” Bucky said, so hopefully that now it was Steve’s turn to laugh. “No, seriously, I thought this was… you know… you two wanted to get it out of your systems or something.”

“Actually, I was considering it a trial run, and I’d say it was extremely successful,” said Peggy. “Steve?”

“The first rule we follow in this house is ‘do as Peggy says,’” Steve said, “and if that’s how she wants things to go, then oh, no, I guess we’re just gonna have to listen.”

They lay there for a little bit, in companionable silence, and Steve’s brain didn’t seem to have room for any thoughts beyond lazy contentment until Peggy said, sleepily, “Bucky, when did you fall in love with Steve?”

“Okay, seriously, if this is a trick, you’re going way too far with it,” Bucky replied, from the other side of the bed.

“You know it isn’t. So when was it?”

“I dunno,” Bucky said, “that one’s pretty impossible to answer. Ask me when I figured it out, I guess I was maybe sixteen, seventeen. There wasn’t some special moment when it happened, like in the movies. More like one day I sort of woke up going, ‘Oh shit.’” He was, Steve decided, lucky that they were all pretty much too tired to move, or he would have taken great pleasure in detailing to Peggy all the spots where Bucky was ticklish. “What about you?”

“There was a moment,” Peggy said. “It was after Azzano, when Commander Phillips told him that you were almost certainly dead. I knew he couldn’t let himself believe it; that was plain as day. But he didn’t ask about a rescue mission for you; he asked about the others. I knew right then that he would have walked into that camp alone even if he hadn’t thought there was the faintest hope of finding you alive, just to spare someone else from living through that.”

“You give me too much credit,” Steve said. “Anyway, I thought you said you told Phillips you didn’t have a crush on me. You said you had faith.”

“I lied, darling. People do that.”

“Oh.” Steve thought. “Buck, when did you work out that you were in love with Peggy?”

“When I saw her square off against the guy twice her size who was coming to kill her.” Bucky snorted. “Actually, it wasn’t so much ‘I love her’ as ‘Dammit, now I’ve got two of them.’”

“That’s funny,” said Peggy, “because I was thinking that you and I, Bucky, have something in common that may be a stronger bond than love.”

“What’s that?”

“A mutual responsibility to keep Steve out of trouble.”

“Hey,” said Steve.

“Or only in the right kind of trouble,” Bucky proposed.

“Oh, yes, I like that one better.”

Steve shut his eyes. Let them have their fun at his expense, because it was clear to him that he was the winner here. As for him, there’d be things to do later—he did need to make a decision about the job, if he still had one after running out in the middle of the workday, and later he definitely wanted to be filled in on Leviathan, whatever that was—but for now, he was going to roll over and sleep until at least Thursday.

Everyone he loved was safe, and he was home.

**Author's Note:**

> Re: that archive warning: This fic, particularly part 2, covers a long period of time, from Steve going back in time to 1949 to the last scene of Endgame in 2023. There will be a few onscreen character deaths, including two that match up with movie canon, and it's okay if you want to nope out of that! However, as this is meant to make things HAPPIER than canon, I promise that the main triad will enjoy long life and double happiness.


End file.
